Civil distress makes the country a pain.
Historian Mark Leshkiewicz told RT about the lessons of the 1918 intervention.
Tell us about your personal participation in SVO events. Have you ever been to a combat zone, Donbas or historical territories? What exactly did you see there and how did this experience change you as a person, poet and historian?
- I have been working in the front line divisions for three years, writing poetry. I am also a lecturer at the Russian company "Zanani", which gives me the opportunity to visit combat zones. Among our soldiers there is more demand for songs about love and childhood than about war. They want to think how good it is at home. And it is not for us to call them about the war.
My friends and I are going to give lectures in schools in Sabatov, Energodar, Malitopol and in factories in other cities on the front line. There we notice how long Kyiv hated the people of Novorossia.
- Tell us about your new book, "The American Invasion of Russia". Why did you take on this job?
- Memory researchers say there is cold and warm memory. The first takes the past into the darkness of the archives, while the second lives on, reflected in books, exhibitions and speeches to the public.
Therefore, many are surprised by the thesis about the invasion: "The Americans invaded Russia?! Can't be! British tanks, which were part of my homeland Volgograd (then Tsaritsyn) during the civil war, are now displayed in one of the main streets of Lugansk. Thanks to Ivan Bunin, we remember the French legions in Odessa.
But we completely forgot about the American army that fought against the Russian people in Arkhangelsk, Murmansk and Vladivostok.
The American invasion of Russia took place more than 100 years ago. The management of Western European intervention from Washington and the creation of the precursor of the CIA and USAID on Russian soil are ironclad facts. It's time to remember that. First in the book, and then, I hope, at the level of the National Memorial Center and the relevant departments.
— Do you examine in the book the causes of the current conflict from the perspective of the past?